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One Week

What would you do?

Writer/director Michael McGowan's One Week is loaded with epic Canadian emblems – Sudbury's Big Nickel, a towering teepee, the Stanley Cup, Alberta's Dinosaur Provincial Park, the world's biggest hockey stick, prophetic messages in the unrolled rims of Tim Hortons' coffee cups, big skies and open prairies, the Tragically Hip's Gord Downie playing a cameo as a stoned biker/philosopher/cancer survivor, a life-changing campfire performance of "Un Canadien errant" in a forest in the Rockies, a whale frolicking in the Pacific Ocean off Tofino, B.C., and a Canadian-to-the-bone soundtrack featuring indie music icons. The central character in McGowan's warm-hearted road movie, Ben Tyler (Vancouver-born Joshua Jackson, best known for Dawson's Creek and Fringe), is a charming daydreamer, spiritually adrift, emotionally underdeveloped, an indifferent school teacher, failed novelist and just days away from marriage in Toronto to his adoring upscale urbanite fiancée Samantha (Liane Balaban) when he learns he has terminal cancer and "maybe two years, maybe one week" to live.
Desperate to find himself, and to escape the consequences of his foreshortened existence (invasive cancer treatment and hospitalization, the concerns of his indulgent parents and future in-laws), Ben finds himself placing a great deal of faith in monuments and symbols of all kinds, of any kind. He buys an old motorcycle in the delirium of panic and abruptly heads west – following Tim Horton's advice –"with an overwhelming urge to embrace randomness."
-Greg Quill, THE TORONTO STAR
Trailer